China’s Huawei has big ambitions to weaken the US grip on AI leadership

In spite of tensions with the US and its allies, Huawei is rapidly building a suite of Artificial Intelligence (AI) offerings unmatched by any other company over the world. Huawei has big ambitious vision stretches from AI chips for data centers and mobile devices to deep-learning software and cloud services, which currently offered by Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. However, the company’s technological ubiquity and the fact that Chinese companies are ultimately answerable to their government are big reasons why the US views Huawei as an unprecedented national security threat.

In recent years, Huawei plans to increase its investments in AI and integrate it throughout the company to “build a full-stack AI portfolio.” In particular, Huawei launched an AI chip for its smartphones, called Ascend, which is comparable to iPhone chip, and tailor-made for running machine-learning code to support face and voice recognition. Huawei also offers a cloud computing platform with 45 different AI services and will plan to release its first deep-learning framework, called MindSpore, which will compete with Google’s TensorFlow or Facebook’s PyTorch.

Besides to the technology itself, governments and companies also require to follow ethical AI, which has been initiated and promoted under AI World Society (AIWS) by Boston Global Forum (BGF) and Michael Dukakis Institute (MDI). In specific, the AIWS Ethics and Practices Index is designed with technical standards to track the AI activities of governments, respect human values and contribute to the constructive use of AI. It is very important to have agreement on AI ethics and standards with a number of national governments and leading countries in G7 and OECD as the AIWS ultimate goal, although there is still a tension between East and West.